Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

Man of Bore

Ah... the days when huge warships sailed the seas for the greater
glory of their empire. You can imagine the feel of the billowing
air, the smell of the sea, the sight of chunky pixels. It was an
age when captains captain's commanded with an iron fist and stood
by unable to do anything until the four minutes of combat were up. Have
you wanted to be commander in a game where you can see all the
action but do nothing about it?

Man of War is a simulation
of the age of naval combat in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. When I
first looked at the manual, I was immediately impressed by the quantity of historical
information included. Man of War also includes a CD-ROM titled Stowaway!,
which is a reference to life on a warship during the time covered by Man
of War. Gameplay in Man of War is divided into two sections. In the
strategic section, you observe the entire map from an omniscient position above
it all. You can issue up to 12 orders to your fleet, and inspect the condition
of enemy ships. I liked the ability to see every detail of my enemy's ships,
but it's a little unrealistic to know the exact condition of an enemy ship many
miles away. Once you have finished issuing orders, you can click the end of
turn button to enter the second section of the game.

More a Passenger than a Captain

The second section of Man of War is touted as "A revolutionary
real-time first-person perspective..." It's actually more like a
graphically poor, half-assed attempt at a first person game.
After you have issued your orders for the turn, you get to stand
around on the heavily pixelated deck of your ship and watch the
other ships, in various states of pixelation carry out combat
while you enjoy the bad frame rate. The real-time section of
this game may be an interesting twist on turn-based strategy, but
the graphics aren't very good and the frame rate on my Cyrix 166
hovered around 9-10 fps. Although it's kind of interesting to be
able to watch the outcome of each turn in real-time, I found it
extremely annoying to be unable to issue any orders in the real-
time phase or to do anything except look around. It is something
of a blessing that the designers let you end the real-time
segment if you get bored, but unfortunately, you can't bypass it
entirely. This means that each turn, you must wait around for 30
seconds or so while the real-time engine loads.

Like Oil
and Water

The turn-based part of Man of War is only fair in quality. It is
nice to be allowed to have up to 150 ships in an engagement, and
the scenario editor is good, but the game does not allow you any
but the most basic targeting options. I would have liked to be
able to choose between targeting the hull of sails of my enemy,
and perhaps load my cannons
with different types of shot, instead of generic cannonballs. At
its heart, the main problem with Man of War is that turn-based
and real-time gameplay do not mix well. The real-time aspect is
aggravating because the player is powerless but to observe, and
the turn-based part breaks up any feeling of action that might
have been developed in the real-time part. Unfortunately, Man of
War ends up a game that sounded good on paper but
turned out not to be seaworthy.